Donald Byrne

Donald Byrne was one of America's strongest players of the 1950s and 60s, an International Master who won the 1953 US Open and represented the United States at three Chess Olympiads. Off the board he was a professor of English at Penn State, where he also coached the university team.

He is best known for a game he lost. On 17 October 1956, at the Rosenwald Memorial in New York, a 13-year-old Bobby Fischer answered Byrne's play with a stunning queen sacrifice; the writer Hans Kmoch dubbed it "The Game of the Century." Byrne was no soft target — he was a formidable master — which is precisely what made the prodigy's win so astonishing.

Byrne's career was cut short by lupus; he died in 1976, aged 45.